She's a Maneater
by Scarlet has Fantasy Issues
Summary: Logan/OC Wolverine/OC: A teenager with a shady past tries to keep herself in line, but there's something dark inside her that only the Wolverine can understand or can he? (rated for strong language and future chapters)


**A/N: After all this time, I have decided to replace my old X-Men stories with something new. I was abhorred with the way I wrote my first set which have been deleted for several months now – my grammar and style were horrible! I am hoping that this one will turn out better than those train wrecks. Things have been changed and reworked or renamed so that it's not too crummy…All I beg is your patience and for you to give this a chance.**

**Without further ado, here is the rushed first chapter to this story…**

**OOOOOOOOO**

There was a cacophony of noise as the small group of mutants assigned by Professor Xavier entered the bar. Grown men and women were shouting at something that couldn't be seen at first, their shouts mixed with anger and violence. The smell of blood clung heavily in the air, mixing with the smell of stale cigarettes, alcohol, and sweat that assaulted Wolverine's sensitive nose.

"You sure she's in here, Fishtail?" he asked as a tall blonde pushed her way to the front of the group of X-Men.

The blonde's ever-shifting blue eyes searched the crowd, glowing slightly as she reached her senses out towards the crowd. "She's here," she said, moving through the crowd.

As the small group of X-Men moved after the blonde, they could see a large cage in the middle of the bar where two men were tearing into each other. Flashbacks of the "good old days" when Logan used to beat up people for some pocket change came to the man's mind. A slight smirk crossed his lips as he followed the blonde closely. The thought of getting the opportunity to beat the living hell out of Scott was almost too good to pass up.

"Addison," Jean said, falling into step next to Logan. "Are you sure you can recognize her after all these years?"

"It's only been ten years, Red," Addison replied. "She can't have changed that much." The blond stopped for a moment and looked around. "She's right there."

The group's gaze followed Addison's finger when she pointed. A teenager with long black hair striped with scarlet tendrils sat at the bar, her back to them as she counted a pile of money in front of her. Her back stiffened slightly as the X-Men moved closer.

"Maria?" Addison asked gently, holding her hand out to touch the teenager's back.

"Don't fucking touch me, Aqua," the girl growled, a slight accent of many origins tinting her voice.

Addison quickly pulled her hand back as if shocked by a jolt of electricity. The teenager's spine straightened with a stiffness that was visible through the mid-riff shirt she wore and her body trembled.

"Why did you bring _them_ here?" Maria demanded and the money she'd made slipped into a pocket. "Did you want me to kill someone…again?"

"N-no," Addison answered with a slight tremor uncertainty in her normally bubbly voice.

Logan could hear the smirk in the girl's voice when she asked, "So, you've forgotten about me, have you, dear sister?"

Logan felt the pull on the metal covering his skeleton, causing a too familiar ache. The teenager's visible hand clenched and he saw some angry red lines appear at her knuckles. He didn't get to comment on it before Jean pushed herself to the front.

"Miss Lehnsherr," Jean said gently. "We're not here to hurt you."

"Not here to -? Ha! Then you haven't done your research, Ms. Grey." The girl turned her head slightly so that her profile was visible while her eyes were not. "_Everything_ hurts me. And my surname isn't Lehnsherr anymore. It's Wayne."

Addison gasped. "You gave up our family's last name?"

"Yeah, and I didn't even have to marry some bird-brained millionaire to do it."

The dingy lights overhead flickered and Logan felt the pull on his skeleton increase. Maria cursed lightly as some of the bottles behind the bar exploded.

"Maria," Jean said, holding a hand out. "You need to calm down."

The teenager stood up before the telekinetic adult could touch her. Her body was trembling even worse and Logan caught a glimpse of the feral blackness in her eyes. Maria ran past them, causing tables to slam against the walls in waves. It looked like a scene right out of a B-rated horror film that he'd seen on one of his sleepless nights, except without the utter destruction of the human life in the room.

"Dammit!" Addison cursed, marching after her sister. "I knew I should have come alone! I should have eased her into this – Dammit!"

Logan paused at the front door of the bar when a loud boom of thunder shook the windows. The sky that had been clear and sunny just moments before was turning an eerie dark grey. A fork of lightning cut the sky in half. His eyes turned towards the teenager who was standing in the middle of the road, her body trembling violently.

"Maria!" Addison called, rushing towards the girl.

Logan rushed after the blonde and grabbed her by the arm. "Wait a minute, Fishtail. What is she? A copy mutant like Rogue?"

The aqua-wielder turned a sad ocean blue gaze onto him. "Logan, she is…_something._ Something very, very dangerous and…unstable. And she needs me, right now." The blonde yanked her arm out of his grasp and ran towards her sister. "Maria, calm down!"

OOOOOOOOO

Maria hugged one of her hands against her chest, feeling the cold metal blades slide out of her knuckles. Her body trembled as the other powers coursed through her system at an increasing speed. These foreign powers were painful as her body tried to place them in something familiar, but when there wasn't anything familiar, they wormed their way into new places.

_Telekinesis, telepathy, lasers, weather manipulation, super-healing…_Maria thought bitterly, lifting her scarlet eyes to the heavens where the lightning rolled from cloud to cloud. _Why does this always happen to me?_

"Maria!" Addison's voice broke through the sound of thunder. "Maria, you need to calm down!"

A wry smirk curled up the corner of the younger mutant's full lips as she turned her head slightly to look at the water manipulator. "Calm down? I don't know the meaning of that order." Another stab of pain burned through her, causing her teeth to grind together. "There's too many of them, too much at once!"

The girl could feel the darker side of her bubbling to the surface. No matter how many times she pushed that part of her down, it would come back. It would always come back. And people would get hurt. Lots of people would get hurt. Again.

Maria could feel her eyes turn a deep, feral black as the darker side took hold. The blades that slid from her knuckles, ripping skin and muscle at the exit points, extended towards the group of mutants who'd come after her. Her eyes turned towards them, hard as flint and her spine stiffened as she looked at them.

"_**You just had to come along and destroy the peace**_," the darker side of Maria said in a cold voice. "_**You mutants never learn to stay away from me – to keep your distance. Do you want the world to lose more people? Do you want the world to turn against mutants even more than they do now?" **_A cold sneer turned up her lips. "_**You have little common sense and yet, this girl has less."  
**_The water wielder's arms wrapped around her from behind, pinning her arms to her sides. Maria jerked at the contact, not desensitized to her sister's powers as she had once been. Her head turned as the blades at her knuckles retracted. Addison rested her chin on the younger girl's shoulder, her soothing voice causing a weird sensation against Maria's ear.

"Come on, Maria," she whispered soothingly. "Calm down…Focus on control…you can do this…"

The dark-haired mutant could feel a haze settling over her mind. It took her a moment to realize that it was some sort of telepathy, but it was too late to combat. Her thoughts quieted down and her mind started to go into the stages of relaxation that came before one fell asleep. Resistance bubbled to the surface, but it was fruitless.

Darkness closed in over her mind and she knew nothing more…

OOOOOOOOO

Maria opened her eyes to see a world of bright colors, so vivid that she knew that this place wasn't real. She pushed herself off of a bench, cleverly placed there to make her feel a semblance of comfort. The dark-haired girl turned, scanning her surroundings with the eyes of a hunter.

"Chuck," she said, noticing how her voice echoed. "Chuck, I know you're the one doing this."

"Hello Maria," the calm voice of Professor Charles Xavier said from behind her. "It has been a long time since I've seen you. You grew up."

"Yeah, that's the funny thing about creatures," Maria growled, turning to face the bald, wheel-chair bound man. "They get bigger and older and less naïve." She folded her arms across her chest. "What do you want with me?"

"Maria, you've left quite a lot of damage behind you wherever you went," Professor X commented, looking at her. "So many minds have been erased and so many people have had homes, schools, hospitals destroyed after you stayed there for increasingly shorter periods of time."

The teenage mutant stuck her chin out defiantly. "I've also killed a number of people in these past eight years," she commented coolly. "Bad people who were hurting others…and children. Children that got in the way or came too close with their own uncontrolled powers…So, go ahead and call me a "murderer", Chuck. A bad child who can't take care of the powers that she's been cursed with."

Professor X's calm expression didn't change as she spoke those words. Maria couldn't understand how nothing she said seemed to strike a nerve in the man's body. She had a feeling it was due to his long life with that damn telepathy, but it didn't seem to matter. He was the only one who actually cared enough to talk to her, rather than enslave her or attack her for deeds she may or may not have done.

"You are not evil, Maria," Professor X commented. "No more than I am or the people who care about you."

A snort escaped her lips. "People who care? Really Chuck! Do you actually think that I'd be what I am if people cared about me?" Her eyes narrowed at him. "The only people who'd ever c_ared_ about me left me or turned into the ones who abused my powers and made me into a weapon. And you don't call me evil…stupid optimism isn't going to get you far in life, Chuck. People will walk all over you…"

Charles looked at her with studying eyes. "Maria…"

"People call me 'Scarlet' now," Maria cut across him. "Because they don't like to associate me with the Virgin Mary…and I can't blame them for that. I'm far from holy."

"Maria," Charles said, leaning forward slightly. "Would you like to come to a place where you can learn to control your gifts?"

"With all kinds of mutant children that could easily get hurt or scared by the youngest daughter of Magneto – I don't think so." She shivered. "I can already feel new abilities around me, trying to find places to latch onto. Why must you do this to me, Charles? Do you want to have to pay for the funerals of the children who get in the way?"

"I have faith in you, Maria," Charles replied. "With some teaching and practice, you can become the master of your gift. You can suppress _her_."

_The Dark Passenger_, Maria thought, not betraying the emotions that came with that part of her. "She can't be controlled. Medicine, electro-shock therapy, hypnotism, the Cure – everything that's supposed to help, doesn't. Can't you see that, Chuck?"

"As I said, I have faith in you. You are stronger than you think you are, Maria, and the fact that you are still here, still clinging to humanity and good, proves that there is hope for you." A soft smile crossed the man's lips. "At the school, you can learn to control your gift and become part of a family. We are all in this together, Maria, and we want to help you."

The dark-haired teenager looked away from the wheelchair-bound man. Her body ached, giving her the faintest connection to her physical body in this world of telepathy. Disordered thoughts flashed through her mind, far too fast for her to really grasp them. All she knew was that she was somewhere that contained a lot of mutants with powers that she either had or hadn't assimilated yet. The presence of powers in their early beginnings of young mutants' lives was very clear to her. She was in a place full of children, some younger and some older than her. The powers were fresh, burning into her with a wave of rawness, grating on her sensitive nerves as they reached out and hit her with wave after wave.

"Chuck…I don't know," Scarlet muttered, raking a hand through her hair. "I don't know if anyone can help me deal with _her_. I don't know if I can handle so many new powers and – people will find out who I am fathered by and then they'll…" She shook her head. "I just don't know…"

"As a wise man once said, you never know until you try," Professor X said softly.

Maria's scarlet colored eyes turned to him once more as he drew nearer. The older man smiled at her and clasped his hands together on his lap. He looked more fatherly than her own father ever had and she remembered how he tried to help her when she was younger, before she'd been abandoned by Addison and then ran away to the far reaches of the country. Those years, she knew, were long gone.

"I'll try," Scarlet finally conceded, bowing her head slightly. "But if I feel trapped or used, I will be gone before you can say something in the non-conversational part in the Hebrew language. I am not going to stand by and let someone walk over me again. If you can promise that you won't stop me from leaving if I feel like it, then I will give this school thing a try."

Professor X nodded. "I promise, Maria."

OOOOOOOOO

The copy mutant walked out of the room that the Professor had told the others to put her in. She realized it was a little room off to the side of a larger conference room. A tremor went through her body as she felt new powers rush into her body, crashing and sinking their icy fingers into her flesh. Her scarlet eyes lifted to the people in the conference room, recognizing most of them from the bar.

The furry blue man in the corner by the weather-manipulator, she recognized from television and the blonde man with large, white wings standing behind her sister she knew was the son of the creator of the Cure. A man –she already decided to hate – with dark shades and reddish-brown hair was seated next to a redhead who she'd also seen on television in a quest to bring peace between people like her and that of the normal citizens. Professor X sat at the head of the table, watching her calmly with a spark of hope in his eyes.

The teenager's eyes then turned to the man who seeped with masculinity and bullshit. His dark eyes connected with hers and she felt another tremor go through her. This man, this mutant, had a feral side to him. Just looking at him, Scarlet knew that he had killed and that he had killed a lot. Just as she had killed so many people before. Continuing her gaze over his body, she mentally noted his good looks and then turned her look away with a look of disinterest. She'd fallen for too many pretty faces before and only three of them had continued to live afterwards. This funny-haired guy wasn't going to be added to the statistic.

"Please say, we're not going to do a round of introductions," Scarlet said, folding her arms over her chest to hide another wave of tremors. "Because frankly, I am too old to have to deal with that shit and I don't care who is who right now. All I want to do is get the hell out of here so I can melt down with these stupid powers that y'all are cursing me with."

"Watch your mouth," the shades guy said, glaring at her. "We don't use that kind of language in this school."

Scarlet's eyebrow rose. "You're deluded, Scooter, if you think that every person in this place follows that little, pathetic rule of yours."

"My name is Scott," the man said.

"That's what I called you," Scarlet retorted with a shrug. "Scooter, Scott – it's really the same thing, Scooter." Her eyes turned away from him and back to the others while he tried to find the ability to put a sentence together. "Y'all are not going to make me do something childish like tell you my bio, are you? Because it's on my Tumblr, Facebook, jail records, and Lord knows where else I've left a trail and haven't removed it yet…" She sent a dirty look at her sister. "And no, you're not going to find my blog, Aqua."

The water-manipulator scowled and crossed her arms, muttering something incoherent under her breath.

"Can I go now?" Scarlet asked, turning her gaze to Professor X. "Like to a room away from the prying eyes? I am starting to feel like someone actually cares…"

Professor X nodded and looked at Addison. "Addison, please escort your sister to her new room. After she gets settled in, perhaps you could give her a tour of our home."

Addison jumped to her feet and circled around the table, holding her hand out to Scarlet as if she'd forgotten that Scarlet wasn't a child anymore. Scarlet turned and started towards the door that lead to the other parts of the school, her attitude disinterested with the world. As Addison moved with her, the dark-haired teen glanced at her.

"Is Scooter really the sex-education teacher?" she asked loud enough for the mutant adult to hear it. "The guy doesn't even seem manly – how does he even know what sex is? Pornos in a little hideaway room?"

Scott's jaw clenched as the door closed behind the two sisters. Logan chuckled as he watched the laser shooting man react to the words of the teenager.

"I think I'm gonna like that kid," Logan commented, pulling out a cigar.

"You would," Scott muttered. "No one has forgotten the encouragement you give the students to go against the rules meant to keep the order…"

"Rules are meant to be broken, _Scooter_," Logan said, moving out of the room with a chuckle.

**OOOOOOOOO**

**A/N: Whatcha think about this? I have to admit that when I first wrote the dynamic relationship between Maria/Scarlet and Addison/Aqua, I was working on it with one of my friends from school. Aqua is the name that belongs to her and I guess the whole character should be considered part of her imagination. (I don't remember her FF account name and doubt she checks it anymore.) But Maria/Scarlet is all my own and I've been reworking her character as the years have gone by.**

**I hope you review and I don't really care if you have strong critiques with flames and negatives – ALL reviews are welcome. I may even reply to you and interact in a way that shapes this story in the future. Thank you for your time and I hope to get another chapter up before this year ends…-Scarlet**


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